Did
someone mess up physics? The size of proton, long thought to be understood,
turns out to be wrong according to new research:
Speaking [...] at the April meeting of the American Physical Society,
researchers said they need more data to understand why new measurements
of proton size don't match old ones.
"The discrepancy is rather severe," said Randolf Pohl, a
scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics. The question,
Pohl and his colleagues said, is whether the explanation is a boring
one — someone messed up the measurements — or something
that will generate new physics theories. [...]
The proton is a positively charged particle in the nucleus of atoms,
the building blocks of everything. Years of measurements pegged the
proton at 0.8768 femtometers in radius (a femtometer is a millionth
of a billionth of a meter).
But a new method used in 2009 found a different measurement: 0.84087
femtometers, a 4 percent difference in radius.
LiveScience has the report:
Here.
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